


who dwells inside his body like an uninvited guest

by broguebingo (adazzledim)



Category: His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman, Original Work
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Coming of Age, Gen, Queer Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-12
Updated: 2018-07-12
Packaged: 2019-06-09 06:44:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,931
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15261690
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/adazzledim/pseuds/broguebingo
Summary: She feels like a stranger in her own skin, the only familiar part of her Aurelio on her shoulder. Holly supposes that’s not how an adult is meant to feel.





	who dwells inside his body like an uninvited guest

**Author's Note:**

> title from a song by the mountain goats. fair warning, this is an au offshoot of a wider story i've been writing for several years; this piece, unlike the rest of it, is too weird to share with anyone irl, hence why it's going up here even though i find 'original work', as a tag, frankly bizarre. point is, don't worry if it's completely incomprehensible. just... try to enjoy anyway i guess?

Aurelio doesn’t settle in France, weirdly. Or maybe it’s not that weird. Holly had just had such high expectations of the trip as a life-defining experience – and it’s not like the opportunities weren’t obviously there, in some way; both Yufei’s and Todd’s daemons settle there, hers in Paris and his at some point in Basse-Normandie – and such a tensely well-developed sense of how much _younger_ than everyone else she somehow is, such a need to prove herself, that she’d thought well _logically_ if anything was going to, to _happen_ , it’d be here, right?

But he… doesn’t. She falls asleep on the guest-room bed after the flight with Aurelio curled around her neck as something ferrety and wakes up three hours later to find him a fantail, missing home already in some way she can’t recognise. She finds out about the… Todd thing from Soph and Aditi in the gift shop at the trench museum and it does nothing but make him more restless, flickering snake-marten-hawk-mouse-caracal in her lap the whole bus ride back. She gets made-over at the Sephora in Paris and comes out with the bones of her face reworked, comes out looking like a woman, and Aurelio just flicks to a dog in the public bathrooms she ducks into to better help her get the stuff off her face. She pines over Canela, goes to a disastrous party or three, rides the Metro, stands in the War Room at Versailles and looks at the ceiling and breathes in centuries and nothing happens. She stands at the reception in a borrowed dress and her flats pinch her toes and her hair sticks up at the back because she didn’t bother to get it cut before they left and she’s not wearing any makeup and she feels – she feels like a stranger in her own skin, the only familiar part of her Aurelio on her shoulder, a fantail again. Holly supposes that’s not how an adult is meant to feel.

(Is he going to settle as a fantail? That wouldn’t be so bad. Fantails are cute, and present no logistical issues. She’d be happy with that.

When she says as much to her mother upon returning from France, Mum gives Holly a look she can’t decipher and goes for a long walk; Holly won’t learn until a month later that fantails are considered omens of death by some, and that one flew in through the kitchen window on the April morning ten years ago on which her grandfather, five hundred kilometres away, drew his last breath.)

But she’s _read_ all the stuff they give you in health classes about when to expect settling, all the curriculum-approved rubbish about formative experiences and sex drives and trauma and puberty; all those old fairytales about the first touch of a lover, trashy YA novels where it’s moments of defiance or the first time the romantic leads meet each other, and why not now? Why can’t she just be _normal_? She’s had crushes and everything. She knows about touching herself. Everyone she can think of, Aditi and Hamish and Lakshmi and Soph and even fucking Dan, they’ve all settled. What do they have that she doesn’t?

She whispers all this to Aurelio the third night in Paris, once she’s sure everyone else in the hostel dorm room has fallen asleep – well, it isn’t like he doesn’t already know she’s been thinking these things for a fortnight or more, they are _literally_ the same person – but she has to say it out loud and have someone hear it somehow. So she says it to him, and he sighs in a long-suffering way and says _I don’t have any answers, Holly, why would I, go to sleep already._

In any case her thoughts on the matter are much the same for the entire trip, this strange little defeatist cycle of self-hatred and doubt, and Aurelio stubbornly keeps changing in Caen and in Rouen and in Paris and in the airport at Singapore on the way home. Changes slower, which is meant to be a good sign, but changes nonetheless. Holly stops really thinking about it when they get back, because exams are an absolute nightmare that year, and then she’s whisked away out of summertime and into cold Colorado winter before she can blink and there’s nothing but her own thoughts and the snow for company.

And somehow, it’s _there_ that something shifts – not during a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity of an experience, surrounded by friends and constant newness, but on a month-long family holiday during which she won’t interact at all with anyone not related to her (which to a teenager is better only than literal solitary confinement, and debatably so). In Utah, standing on the cold red dirt under the biggest sky she’s ever seen, Holly takes a breath in and feels something slot into place. It’s not there that Aurelio settles, but it’s there that they exchange a look that says: _almost. Even if you don’t quite believe it._

The Southwest gives Holly a lot of space, and maybe that’s what she needs; home would be too claustrophobic to figure out what she needs to figure out. She thinks a lot about how to come out to her parents, and what exactly she’s going to come out _as_ , and whether or not any of her friends are really her friends, and what she’s going to do with the rest of her life: a whole lot of stuff she’d never talk to anyone but Aurelio about, basically.

(And there’s that one night, the night they move from her aunt’s house to a friend’s place they’ll be housesitting for a fortnight, and something in Holly, her bones or her guts or her dark lizard hindbrain, recognises that she’ll be alone all night, behind a door that locks, and it’s terrible but it’s all she can do to keep her hands off herself during the car ride over –

– yeah, there’s that, which in hindsight is probably something to do with her sex drive. Needless to say, this is another topic of conversation exclusive to her and Aurelio.)

By the time he actually settles she’s almost forgotten to keep worrying about it. They’re having dinner with the cousins instead of at the housesitting house, after a day of skating on the frozen pond at the bottom of the hill, and Holly is helping Aunty Evie with dinner. There’s a moment where she looks out at her family in the living room, and thinks about the family she stumbled into in France – both the one that hosted her and the big messy collection of kids she saw all the sights with – and the friends waiting for her back home, and she’s convinced, for the first time, that she _belongs_ somewhere. It doesn’t matter if she’s a bit rough at the edges; inexplicably, they’re all willing to shuffle around so that she’ll fit.

Holly draws a breath in and looks at Aurelio, where he’s perched on the end of the countertop, something furry and sand-coloured, and he looks back at her, and what she feels isn’t the last piece of a puzzle dropping into place. It’s more like… the last of the edge pieces. She exhales, and she’s got an outline now. She’s ready to start filling in a picture of a person.

 _Auntie Evie_ , she says, and Auntie Evie hums and turns to look at her, still stirring the cheese sauce. _Sorry, but d’you know what animal Aurelio is?_

 _Sweetheart, I told you, just call me Niamh, you’re not a kid anymore,_ her aunt sighs, and tips down her glasses to squint at her daemon. _That looks like a meerkat to me. Why? Are you –_ she stops. Bugs her eyes out, a weirdly familiar little gesture that makes it abundantly clear she’s Mum’s sister, instead of saying the words.

 _I think so,_ Holly whispers, even though it isn’t really a secret.

_Just now?_

_Yeah._

_Holly – oh Holly, hon, c’mere,_ Niamh breathes, and switches the burner off before turning around to fold Holly in her arms. It feels almost traitorous to even think it, but her aunt is a much better hugger than her mother; she’s the right shape for it, slightly shorter and softly rounded where Holly and Mum are both tall and sort of lanky. It’s ridiculously comforting.

 _So,_ Niamh says when they’ve broken apart, back at normal volume like this is any other conversation, _a meerkat, huh? You see that coming?_

 _No,_ Holly says, a little surprised at how steady her voice is. _I don’t think he’s ever even – oh, maybe once or twice, but I never thought –_

 _It’s like that sometimes,_ her aunt says reassuringly, turning the burner back on. _All those people who say,_ oh, I always knew what he was gonna be, _they’re not – it’s not everyone. Sometimes it just blindsides you._

 _All my friends said stuff like that,_ Holly admits. It’s incredibly good to be actually saying this stuff out loud, to someone who isn’t technically the same person. _Knowing what they were gonna be. Or, they suspected it at least. It was…_

 _Felt weird, huh?_ Niamh grins and chuckles to herself, softly, an old, private amusement. _Being the odd one out. Yeah, I was – you'd never guess it, looking at me, but I was a bit of a late bloomer. Nothing drastic, and you know the average settling age has gotten older even over the last couple decades, but enough that I never felt normal._

_Huh._

_Yeah. Anyway, enough about me. You feeling up to telling Kay_ – for someone so averse to her own nickname, Auntie Evie never stops trying to force one on her equally-inclined sister – _and your dad, or d’you want to let it sit a while?_

This, now, this is a question Holly’s become well acquainted with over the past months, albeit on an entirely different topic, and since this one’s stakes are a good bit lower – well, it’s not like the coming-out thing, it isn’t like she can hide the fact that Aurelio’s stopped changing the way she can hide liking girls – she’s got an answer almost immediately. _Yeah, I think I should tell them now. Sooner rather than later anyway, Mum’ll just get mad if I don’t say something right away._ She and Niamh share a long-suffering sort of Look. Mum does tend to take it as a personal affront to her parenting skills when her children don’t trust her enough to immediately tell her things that happen to them. Coming out is going to be… a trial by fire, to put it one way.

But it’s going to be one that Holly will survive, and she’ll come out the other side better for it, she thinks now; better, stronger, more honest, less twitchy about fewer secrets, and still with a place to let her guard down a little at the end of the day. A picture of a person, and she can make that picture look however she wants.

 _Well,_ says Niamh, _if you want, I can manage the rest of this on my own, no time like the present…_

And Holly, grinning, glances at Aurelio, who says, _I guess not?_ She picks him up off the counter – he goes immediately to perch on her shoulder, leaning against the side of her head for a moment, and okay, maybe those clichés do exist for a reason, because it feels righter than anything she's ever felt before – and together they step out of the kitchen and into what Holly supposes is going to be the rest of her life.

**Author's Note:**

> stay tuned for maybe more daemon related bullshit!!!


End file.
